Patching up environment is a wrong-headed model
From the November 2006 edition of Agriculture Today.
‘Futures thinker’, Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe, AO, has made an empathetic and compassionate pitch to urban consumers, inviting them to a “better party” if they can change their habits.
Professor Lowe told a Sydney audience “most decision makers still seem to believe that if the economy is strong, problems in society and environment can always be patched up later.
“That is not only a wrong headed model, but it’s actually not working.”
Professor Lowe, from Griffith University, delivered the first of six free public lectures dedicated to the prominent Australian Rick Farley, who died this year, aged 53.
“He cared deeply for the land and worked tirelessly to remind us of the need to build communities living in balance with our wonderful landscapes,” Professor Lowe said, acknowledging Mr Farley’s expression that “care for country is basic to the survival of our entire nation”.
Professor Lowe asked the audience to “negative brainstorm”, to imagine how to achieve strategies to ensure an unsustainable future; he then summarised the key elements of consumerism, to a round of uncomfortable but genuine mirth.
“In economic terms, we are operating our ecological accounts at a heavy deficit for which our children will pay,” he said.
“The world population has doubled in the last forty years, but we have developed so successfully that we have more food per person now that ever before and are on average three times as wealthy as forty years ago [yet] there are more people hungry today than forty years ago.”
Professor Low cited climate change as the most urgent challenge because it is not only a critical problem in its own right, but also a compounding factor for other environmental issues.
“Climate change is a difficult problem because it is caused by our level of energy use, which in turn is responsible for our material standard of living.”
Advocating renewable energy as one solution, he said natural energy flows are huge, far greater than human energy needs.
“I would like to see a medium term target like that suggested by the [Federal] government’s own experts 15 years ago, 30 per cent, and I can’t see any argument against a longterm goal of being completely dependent on a mix of renewables by 2040.
Sweden, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand already use a substantial proportion of renewables.
Those countries “don’t have better resources than us, they don’t have better researchers than us, they just have leaders looking 20 years ahead”.
Professor Lowe expected many alternatives to evolve and told the audience “a better party is starting up … because our children will be able to keep enjoying it after we are gone.
